REINVENTING THE STANDARDIZED TEST: Pearson has been adjusting its internal focus from print to digital; now the global education giant is out with a study of how that shift can improve testing around the world. “Preparing for a Renaissance in Assessment” argues that our current standardized tests – many of them, of course, developed by Pearson – aren’t making the grade. They’re not sensitive enough to accurately assess student performance at either the low or the high ends of the scale. They don’t give teachers timely, useful feedback. And they’re too focused on assessing low-level skills, rather than the competencies valued in today’s workplace, such as critical analysis, personal communication and hands-on problem solving. What’s the solution? Pearson touts the power of adaptive technology to customize exams. It’s also high on using computer algorithms to robo-grade student essays. (The report states as a fact that the PARCC consortium will use automated essay scoring, though member states have not yet made that determination.) The company also wants to see assessments that collect far more information than current tests, covering “multiple dimensions” of student ability.
– In short, Pearson envisions a future in which students produce ever more data . The report notes that “without such a systematic, data-driven approach to instruction, teaching remains an imprecise and somewhat idiosyncratic process that is too dependent on the personal intuition and competence of individual teachers.” Speaking of teaching, authors Peter Hill and Sir Michael Barber also argue that the field must evolve into a more tightly controlled profession with higher barriers to entry and a common framework for evaluating quality. That will require repudiating a tradition of “teaching as a largely under-qualified and trained, heavily unionized, bureaucratically controlled ‘semi-profession’ lacking a framework and a common language,” Hill and Barber write. Read the report: http://bit.ly/1w0jYvK
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education and commented:
WOW!! Looking forward to a world of mindless drones.
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Sadly, mindless drones are precisely what the private sector wants.
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yep
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Sure, Pearson wants more “data” to make “better” decisions, but answers on multiple choice tests (the easiest, most frequent, data collected) only means a person shows they know some small factoid, or how to not pick the wrong answer (even though they really didn’t know the right one).
The real world needs data to prove creative planning, ingenuity, resourcefulness, team cooperation, self-sacrifice, altruism, self-control, and many other facets of the affective domain. But, this information is rarely, if ever, proven on a test (especially the low-level domain questions on most standard MC tests).
Also, there are few, if any, long-term and longitudinal studies showing how tests scores as predictors correlate to “preparedness for life” (ex. becoming a responsible citizen, a positive contributor to the GDP, having fewer divorces and less dysfunctional families, etc. etc.). So, we obsess about the predictors but are not sure of how they relate to the criteria of just what is “success”, and as all studies show one’s family life and family support is the main predictor of anyone’s success, not test scores (which maybe correlative, whereas family input in causal).
Yes, we assume doing good in school has some positive correlation to being successful in life, but there are many outliers.
Before all this data was demanded, collected and sought for, my generation (grad HS in ’78) only took classes and the SAT, and that was it. Yet, we were prepared for college and post-secondary life. So, why all the obsession about data now, when in the past it was not fussed over?
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“So, why all the obsession about data now, when in the past it was not fussed over?”
Two reasons:
(1) Western-world pendulum has swung back (for at least the third time– maybe 5th time since 1900?) to favor the ‘factual’ over the intuitive– empirically-provable ‘truths’ over common sense based on experience. We seem to have to go through this during every eco upheaval, & also at key junctures in the evolution of philosophy. Currently, I believe we have a double-whammy of eco downturn & backlash against the growing dominance of secular over spiritual.
(2) At present (unlike in ’78 when you graduated) we are approaching a peak in the incidence of cognitive dissonance between available tech & social response (i.e., laws to curb tech & make it work for the public). Hence there is a plethora of data-system vendors, & little to stop them from dominating the public sphere for the sole pursuit of profit.
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“The report notes that ‘without such a systematic, data-driven approach to instruction, teaching remains an imprecise and somewhat idiosyncratic process that is too dependent on the personal intuition and competence of individual teachers.’ ”
Yep, that’s exactly what teaching is like – it’s like human interaction. Imagine!
And they – a duo which never taught – have an “app” that can fix that.
For one of our resident experts – Bob Shepard, or Señor Swacker:
Aren’t adaptive tests invalid (aside from the usual reasons) simply because every kid gets a different test? No comparisons can be made among the sample of test takers when each test is unique, right? So these would be double jeopardy?
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Yes, Christine, those tests are just as invalid as any standardized test. Once it has been shown (and Wilson has proven it, I’ve never seen any rebuttal or refutation whatsoever) that a process is epistemologically and ontologically invalid, it does not matter how much one tweaks it. And as you state, would have a tendency to make those adaptive test results even less comparable than a “static” test-not that results are validly comparable on them anyway.
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Wow. Just WOW! I’m rendered completely speechless by this declaration by the Imperial Overlord, Pearson (fortunately, I am still able to type however).
Normally, in such situations of speechlessness, I would ask my Robot Teaching Assistant to craft a substantive reply on my behalf. However, he’s in the Faculty Lounge on a smoking break. You see, I have one of the earliest models: The Robot Teaching Assistant v. 1.001.
My Robot Teaching Assistant was manufactured way back when, at a time when Teaching Robot designers and manufacturers believed Teaching Robots would interact best with students if they were imbued with qualities like empathy and compassion. Of course, in giving the earliest Teaching Robot series human qualities–those qualities most-helpful to teaching–they also picked up bad habits like smoking and drinking. Which is truly unfortunate for me, because most of the reason I was even willing to invest in my Robot Teaching Assistant was to use him as my designated driver.
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Hey, that’s pretty good. I needed a laugh. I’m tired. Thanks.
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Hey bring your RTA down to the Pink Slip and I’ll treat! Just keep him away from that Hemlock Society guy.
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Here we have more “dispatches from the elitist bubble.” Teachers today don’t have sleepless nights over how to further sort and rank students. They want to know how to engage and inspire students, how to help them master material that will allow them to develop cognitively and socially. Children are not static entities, and there is no need to pigeon hole them. In fact, more sorting and ranking leads to greater inequality. Teaching is not a profession of laser accuracy; it’s messy! While feedback and assessment inform instruction, the endless ranking and sorting of standardized tests is wasteful of valuable resources and time.
As far as their insulting comments about teaching as a profession, their ignorant comments are perhaps due to a lack of familiarity with American public education, a system that until recently has been the cornerstone of democratic principles. It is bold and brash, kind of like the way “the Yanks” fought in World War II so that Britain would not fall to Hitler and fascism. We may lack class and polish, but we’re doing fine without their edification.
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Repudiating a tradition of “teaching as a largely under-qualified and trained, heavily unionized, bureaucratically controlled ‘semi-profession’ lacking a framework and a common language”…..
I find this a “common language” for framing the need for “modernizing teaching” meaning, push alternative entry points into teaching in order “to attract and retain new teachers,” offer pay-for-performance and career ladders, and demolish unions who are responsible for the damage being done to kids.
The same rhetoric is coming from left and right. It is the political song and dance forwarded by more than Pearson who is becoming the defacto owner of American education. This “modernize teaching” by killing unions and blaming current teachers (and teacher training) for everything wrong is being proposed by the best way to win votes across party lines– no big difference between Democrats and Republicans.
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Renaissance and assessment should never be used in the same sentence.
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Yes, Cee, Yes!
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These “experts” are so insulting, they might as well state that, in their opinion, teachers are worse than trained monkeys – untrained monkeys. Shame on them and their agenda.
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If Pearson wants a Renaissance of Testing, does that mean we are currently in a Dark Ages of Assessment?
I would kind of agree with that, actually.
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But not for the same reasons Pearson might have.
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Computer applications to score students’ writing samples have been duds!
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I will let my students know how incompetent I am, and how substandard. It’s odd but they have no clue???!!!
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I really wish our unions would do something to fight standardized testing.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/utlaaccountability/
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Pearson is trying to sell vaporware.
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That seems very likely.
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They sold LAUSD a truckload already.
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Proposals like this reveal how little the corporate reformers understand about the day to day operation of public schools and especially the children they serve.
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I suspect neither is even factored into the equation.
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“here is consensus among leaders in the field that we are on the brink of an assessment renaissance that will help secure high standards for all, remove current achievement ceilings and support a focus on the higher-order thinking and inter- and intra-personal skills vital for living and learning in the twenty-first century.” (p. 70)
Geez, this is tantamount to saying we are moving a goal post for the students and teachers to make it even more challenging for students to meet the standard than it is today. They don’t even bother mention the ill-conceived character of standardized test in their damn “assessment” cook book. I’m pretty sure Pearson’s invention of Renaissance will entice many OECD nations–including Japan and the US–to dupe gullible national leaders and education bureaucrats.
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This passage made me burst out laughing. It sounds like a 19thc. ad for a magic elixir.
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Yessiree, Bob! Step right up for your snake oil!
I just came home from a committee meeting at my union which is working on how to stop the testing steamroller. I was astonished to learn (probably because I have been retired for three years) that SALESMEN are now calling on principals and literally selling them testing programs that they claim will raise student scores on the “real” tests by 5 points. And principals are using outside GRANT monies to purchase these magic elixirs! Then they are mandating that these tests be given in addition to those the district is already requiring. Apparently, “data” from testing is entered into a network, and the data analysts tell you how poorly performing your kids are compared to other ones.
It is mind blowing, and possible when you hire principals with no experience in a classroom who are on one year contracts and who must raise test scores to keep their jobs. (“Ed reform” in my state first came in 1993, and principals were prohibited from joining a union as a result – in progressive Massachusetts)
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Not only that, Christine, but ignorant administrators are scheduling in the salesmen for “professional development”‘ for entire faculties.
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Woe unto the once-blue Massachusetts! We are doing same sort of softshoe in once-blue NJ. And both states at the top of the heap educationally for many decades! That alone should tell voters that more is afoot than ‘improving education’. But perhaps they’re already reading the score-card [written by the ed-reformers]: follow this yellow brick road to cheaper schools & hence lower property taxes!
Dream on, taxpayers. The salesmen of testing programs are way ahead of you. As are your elected officials, who feed at that trough.
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I am physically cringing. BTW, just finished “Station Eleven” where a combined symphony/Shakespeare troupe tours post-apocalyptic settlements playing Beethoven and putting on plays. On the front of their wagons, “Because survival is insufficient.” The theme of the book is exactly counter to the values of the testing culture. Another cringe, testing culture: total oxymoron.
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awesome
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I would blog more, but I must recharge my batteries.
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Screw Pearson and their data driven one size fits all ineffective but profitable info done on the backs and and stress of students that they could care less about
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That just about sums it up. These people are very, very dangerous and deranged.
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Could Pearson be venturing into anti-trust territory? They’re starting to quack like a monopoly.
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Sadly it would appear that antitrust laws are not enforced, & monopoization is at the heart of US job losses for a couple of decades. Read it & weep:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1003.lynn-longman.html
To my mind, the legislation since Reagan came into office in 1980 are one long litany leading us to a govt bought & pd for by corporate interests. I see it as a craven govt response to the [inevitable, to students of history] threat of globalism, & a mad free-for-all by financiers to ensure their majority chunk of the shrinking pie, at the expense of the public.
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If I understand Pearson correctly, they’ve been holding back on the good stuff until now.
¿?
You know, just like merit pay incentivizes teachers to finally do their work properly, the promise of future $tudent $ucce$$ is apparently encouraging Pearson to finally get around to correctly doing standardized testing.
😏
Funny, that when one starts to think like an “education reformer” you can find so many of their own petards on which they have hoisted themselves…
😎
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LOL. Indeed
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“. . . to finally get around to correctly doing standardized testing.
There is no correct way of “doing standardized testing.”
(And, yes KTA, I know you know that fact, I just couldn’t help myself in reiterating that truth.)
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Someone said this is the golden age of education in California. We are 48th in the country by many measures including funding! Dark ages is much more accurate than the golden age. This is definitely not a renaissance. Admin puts down social emotional support as not effective (doesn’t link to improved data) until some common core consultant says it does. Talking out of both sides of mouth methinks. IT IS ALL ABOUT the $ (not the kids)!
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Wasn’t this coming on for a long time in CA, judging from passage of Prop 13 in 1978? CA voters were already asserting, 36 yrs ago, their reluctance to foot the bill for public ed. A once-tops-in- public-ed state– w/whom I was proud to share reciprocal teacher-cert in 1970– is nowvat the bottom of the heap.
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Hill & Barber — more of the McKinsey “turn around” models????
Prior to Pearson, Michael was a Partner at McKinsey & Company and Head of McKinsey’s global education practice. He co-authored two major McKinsey education reports: How the World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better (2010) and How the World’s Best-Performing Schools Come Out on Top (2007). He is also Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Exeter.
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This article calls Barber “mad professor” http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/jun/14/michael-barber-education-guru in 1993 he was anti-testing
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That was before they bought Harcourt Assessment.
One of the most well known of our current crop of Edupundits used to go around the country giving talks and doing consulting on the subject of how awful summative testing should be replaced by formatives. But then the CC$$ hit, and he saw from whence the river of green was flowing.
There are many such.
Basically, this piece from Lord Barbarous is about how teaching will be so much better once it is entirely controlled by . . .
Pearson, not Persons
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and a “mandarin” of high salary in the newspapers in London…. “Sir Michael was handed the deal 18 months ago as part of a wider contract with management consultants McKinsey.
Originally McKinsey was planning to charge £7,340 a day for Sir Michael’s advice on improving Pakistan’s education system over 45 days, making a total of £330,300.
Overall, four consultants were to be paid £910,000 for 250 days’ work, although this was reduced to £676,720 after the firm agreed a ‘social sector discount’, which took Sir Michael’s daily rate to £5,505. A fellow director was paid the same rate while two ‘senior consultants’ were paid £2,350 a day.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2020409/Sir-Michael-Barber-paid-4-400-day-foreign-aid-advice.html#ixzz3M27JjHHp
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So, “Sir Michael” got a pile of money for offering his sage advice to Pakistan’s educational system?
I guess after hearing that the Bush administration here paid torture “consultants” $81 million nothing much surprises me these days. And, these were people who reportedly had no specific knowledge of the culture or linguistics of the people they were going to torture -let along counter-terrorism. And, the original contract was for more than $180 million. One of their crazy proposals included mock burials.
NBC news had the headline, “CIA Paid Torture Teachers….” Wow. I watched a quick interview with one of these so-called consultants. And he had the usual cool, calm, banal “it’s all so scientific” demeanor.
I’m so sick and tired of this concept of the “all-knowing” consultant. And, these “torture teachers”….. what a disgusting insult to the best things our nation is meant to stand for.
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Funny how a regime that purports to want to develop “critical analysis” skills for students goes to such lengths to stymie any attempts to analyze and question their motivations, premises, expertise, behavior and outcomes.
College (Debt) and (Poverty Wage) Career Ready…
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!!!
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Bottom Line………Pearson makes a new test so they can charge a higher price for a document that may or may not have any validity.
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Good point, Matt, but no question that it’s “may not;’ actually, it’s do not. And, yes, we all know that their tests stink, are NEVER improved & that their test scoring methods (& the majority of people they hire to do it–read Todd Farley’s book, “Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry–from 2009, & NOTHING has improved–gotten worse–have you seen their ads in the papers?&–read Todd’s article in the Huff Post Education {2012, I think} about electronic scoring of essays–in fact, several people have written more recent posts, right her on Diane’s blog, I believe) are as invalid as the tests.
And I like the motto, Bob–“Pearson, not Persons,” but I’d amend it to:
Pear$on, not Persons (have to have the $ sign–“Pear$on–
Alway$ Earning”)
(& NEVER “Learning!”)
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That book is on my bookshelf! However, machines will have replaced Mr. Farley.
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new corporate motto:
Pearson, not Persons
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In other news, a new study shows that a mere five days away from computer screens dramatically increases children’s ability to read other people’s emotions:
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-camp-no-screens-nonverbal-emotional-cues-20140821-story.html
So, we can have kids who are empathetic or, in the Brave New World envisioned (“envisioneered?”) by Sir Michael Barbarous, we can have ones who are
little psychopaths in training,
suckled at the electronic teat by Mother Pearson,
without all that nasty dependence “on the personal intuition and competence of individual teachers.”
Pearson, not Persons
If you had any doubt whatsoever that Ed Reform in its standards-and-testing, computerized learning, data-driven manic phase was about anything other than replacing teachers with teaching machines and low-level aids wandering among the kids to see ensure that the machines are up and running, I hope this latest from Sir Barbarous awakens you.
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cx: aides, of course, not aids
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The study you cite is not surprising. In the early ’90’s, my husband & I removed commercial hand-held video games from our 3- & 5-yr-old sons, having noted their sudden w/drawal from social contact, & addictive behavior. There was much weeping & gnashing of teeth.
Our methods were reinforced by friends who declared ‘electronics-free’ Saturdays. Those kids became heavily involved in community bands, & our kids followed suit.
My husband soon installed a home-computer network equipped w/educational games (much slower-paced, yet retained their interest, & they were able to move regularly, at will, away from the games to real-life social encounters & physical activity). We also made it clear that violent content was verboten (as internet became available), & encouraged those games that inspired them to create theme-related artistic & musical works. Within 2 or 3 yrs, they were learning Japanese & French phrases, to communicate online with global game contenders. All 3 ended up music-techies, w/all the social skills needed to get a band off the ground & running.
For more than a dozen yrs I continue to develop & teach foreign-language curriculum to the PreK level. We would usually close with a short video segment– a cartoon or live-actor rendition of a song or vocabulary we were learning.
For 2 yrs now, I’ve substituted other activities (more songs & stories) at the behest of PreK school directors, who are drastically reducing video & computer content as a counter-balance to over-the-top screen-time at home. In retrospect, I remember my students’ anxious anticipation of video material, yet how passive & hyper-focused they were on its delivery. I have not had a single request, even from longtime students, for that old video content!
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Every year, the DOD does a massive cross-service simulation exercise. Last year (or was it the year before? I do not remember) the DOD hired a gaming company to create its cross-service simulation, based on a Zombie apocalypse scenario that would enable the services to run through practices based on actions conducted within this country involving unrest in the civilian population. One can’t make up stuff that scary.
At the beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five, there is a scene in which the narrator tells the wife of an old war buddy that he is writing an anti-war book. Might as well write an anti-glacier book, she tells him. I feel that way about these technologies. We cannot not go forward with them. So, what you did seems to me a superb model for others to follow.
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“The Renaissance of Testing”
A Renaissance of testing
Enlightenment of torture
A culture of molesting
And reason of a vulture
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Spanish /French Freelancer………”We also made it clear that violent content was verboten & encouraged those games that inspired them to create theme-related artistic & musical works. ” I am certainly with you on that one…. the technology that is set up to “kill women” or to gain precision in weaponry is the same used to train combat service men and it is available to teenagers (some already having DSM IV diagnoses) who are vulnerable and impressionable….
I was one in high school or college who read any of the censored books but that was totally different to this mass indoctrination in violence. On the other hand, I also learned that , given 10 minutes a day of the Pat Suppes math software on distributed computers, we could get the math scores up with our inner city students (but it took two or more years to get the reading scores to show improvement
Because of your love of music / languages, perhaps you would comment on this observation. Watching grandchildren over the years I have seen them repeatedly practice with a song such as “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” where they spontaneously want to repeat the song and act it out (like they want to hear their favorite stories over and over again). In pre-schoolers the practicing is essential (each might choose their own favorites)…. Visiting in a home where I was just an observer, I watched a first grader repeat a part of Star Wars movie , all alone, with no adult interaction or sibling “play”, and he would rewind and repeat the Star Wars episode repeatedly over the duration of 45 minutes or more repeating the same sequence.. Have you ever observed this “practicing” with the technology in young children? I was fascinated at the time but haven’t been able to analyze what it was he was gaining ; but it might be “command” or “power” where in the preschooler it is often safety or security issue they are acting out. Just thought you might have some observations. Thanks
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Reblogged this on 21st Century Theater.
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